Does anyone seal jelly jars with paraffin anymore? This old Parowax ad reminded me of how much I’ve changed the way I seal jam and jelly jars. I can clearly remember putting wax on the top of jelly jars when I was a young adult – but shifted to using canning lids and water-bath processing years ago.
A hundred-year-old small promotional cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company has lots of intriguing recipes. I decided to try the Oatmeal Muffins recipe.
The muffins were easy to make, and lovely – though I must admit that I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t really tell that they contained any oatmeal. Instead the seemed very similar to muffins made using only all-purpose flour. The bottom line – if you are looking for a nice basic muffin, you’ll like this recipe.
Here’s the original recipe:
And, here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
1 cup water
1/2 cup old-fashioned oatmeal
1 1/2 cups milk
3 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon melted butter
Preheat oven to 400° F. Grease muffin pans (or use paper liners).
Bring water to a boil in small saucepan, then stir in oatmeal. Reduce heat to low and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in milk.
In the meantime in a mixing bowl combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add oatmeal mixture, egg, and butter; then stir just enough to combine. Spoon batter into muffin cups; fill each cup about 3/4ths full. Place in oven. Bake approximately 25 minutes or until lightly browned and the muffins spring back when lightly touched.
Milestone wedding anniversaries are a cause for celebration both now and a hundred year ago. Here’s an old-time suggestion for a lovely silver (25th) wedding anniversary tablescape:
Inverted in a fern dish of the same metal a silver vase forms the fountain, the falling water being strands of silver tinsel. Feathery moss, violets, and lilies-of-the-valley are arranged in the top of the fountain; also border the “pool” which is a mirror. The silver dishes contain bonbons in violet, white, and pistachio.
Ladies Home Journal (November, 1911)
I generally like old-fashioned fruit puddings, so I was pleased when I saw a recipe for Apple Pudding in a hundred-year-old cookbook.
Most modern apple recipes call for cinnamon and other spices, so I was surprised that this recipe didn’t use any spices. But they weren’t needed–the Apple Pudding was pure apple and delightful. The apples were embedded in a lovely moist cake pudding.
In general the directions in this old recipe are a little vague. It provides no clue how many apples should be used; and I was left to decide what a moderate oven meant. However, the recipe was very specific that Cleveland’s Superior Baking Powder should be used. Of course, I’ve never heard of Cleveland’s and it’s probably not been made for decades. So I had to make due with a modern baking powder brand, which worked just fine. This recipe may have been originally published by the Cleveland Baking Powder Company. Perhaps Mrs. Wm. Mock liked it, and submitted the same exact recipe for the church cookbook.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
4 cups sliced apples
1 tablespoon butter, melted
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 1/2 cups milk
Preheat oven to 350° F. Place sliced apples into a 7 1/2 X 12 X 2 inch rectangular casserole dish, or other similarly-sized dish.
Put butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, egg, and milk into a mixing bowl; beat until smooth. Pour the batter over the apples. Place in oven and bake for 1 hour – 1 hr, 15 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm or cool. If desired, may be served with whipped cream or milk.
Wallpaper was very popular a hundred years ago – and there were lots of lovely papers that worked perfectly in dining rooms. Here’s some advice for using striped wallpapers:
French-striped papers come under the head of plain papers. They look well and are particularly appropriate in Colonial homes. They may be used in the bedroom, dining room, hall or reception room, and look equally well with either plain or figured hangings. They look better, however, with white woodwork than any other kind.
Over the next couple weeks I have several picnics on my calendar. Potato Salad is the quintessential picnic food, so I was pleased to find a hundred-year-old Potato Salad recipe.
At first I wasn’t quite sure about the recipe. It didn’t contain the usual Potato Salad ingredients like celery and mayonnaise, but rather was a vinaigrette dressing. Yet, the recipe was so easy that I decided to give it a try.
The Potato Salad was lovely, and the vinaigrette dressing with a hint of pepper was just right. It added a delightful flavor to the potatoes, but didn’t overwhelm them. This recipe is a keeper.
The old recipe made a lot of dressing relative to the potatoes, so I divided it by three when I revised it. Here’s the updated recipe for modern cooks:
3 large potatoes (approximately 3 cups diced)
3/4 cup onion, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon vinegar
1/3 teaspoon salt
1/3 teaspoon black pepper
parsley sprigs for garnish, optional
Peel and dice potatoes into 3/4 inch chunks. Put into a sauce pan, cover with water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until the potatoes are just barely tender (about 5-7 minutes). Remove from heat and drain. Chill in refrigerator for several hours, then add onions.
In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Pour this dressing over the potatoes and onions. Gently toss to coat the potatoes with the dressing. Put in serving bowl; and, if desired, garnish with parsley sprigs.
A hundred years ago people didn’t have markers that could be used to write labels on canning jar lids. They also didn’t have printers to print labels or even clear tape that could be used to attach labels to the jars. Back then newspapers often printed labels that could be cut out and pasted on jars of freshly canned food.
I generally prepare posts for this blog fairly quickly – but today’s post is an exception. It’s taken me over five years from the time that I first thought about doing this post to actually posting it.
I recently was browsing through a hundred-year-old magazine and saw this tip:
Sometimes the women folks can’t remember when they put up certain cans of fruit. Paste a dated slip of paper on the side.
Farm Journal (August, 1915)
The old tip reminded me that back in 2011, which was the first year I was doing this blog, that I’d scrolled though some old microfilms of hundred-year-old issues of the Milton (PA) Evening Standard, and had been surprised how the newspaper regularly printed labels for commonly canned foods – cherries in July, tomatoes in August, grape juice in September . . .
I copied a page with labels for tomatoes from the newspaper and planned to do a post on it – but somehow I never actually got around to writing that post and quickly forgot about it until I saw the Farm Journal tip. So here is the post – better late than never.
